The supreme court continues aiding the decline of civil liberties
I step away from the blog for a bit and the supreme court pounds away some more.
Prosecutors can use evidence seized by police during a home search even though officers violated the Constitution by failing to knock or announce their presence before entering, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled.
The justices, voting 5-4 in a Michigan case, today put new limits on the so-called exclusionary rule, which in some circumstances bars prosecutors from using the product of an illegal search. The majority said the exclusionary rule doesn’t apply to violations of the “knock and announce” requirement for home searches.
Basically, evidence can be used against you if the police screw up by not knocking. This goes against the exclusionary rule which stated that evidence obtained unconstitutionally was invalid and could not be used. In other words, no-knock warrants will soon be standard operating procedure.
We have police who cannot legally be held to account for violating the provisions of the constitution. And we now will no longer exclude evidence obtained via violation of the constitution. So, in such a case, your recourse is non-existent.
Fuckers.
As to the details:
In the Michigan case, prosecutors opted not to argue that the entry into Hudson’s home was constitutional, instead contending that the exclusionary rule shouldn’t apply to knock- and-announce violations. The state, backed by the Bush administration, argued that those types of police errors don’t enable officers to seize additional evidence.
Scalia agreed, saying the connection between the manner in which police enter a home and the evidence they discover is too weak to warrant application of the exclusionary rule. He said the knock-and-announce rule doesn’t protect “one’s interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant.”
That’s not an error. It is intentional.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:34 am
teh supreme court cuts down teh poison tree
June 16th, 2006 at 8:44 am
Fourth paragraph: Dissenting Justice Stephen Breyer said the ruling “destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement.” Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter joined Breyer’s opinion.
Fifth paragraph: The dispute may have been one in which Alito’s vote decided the outcome. The court heard arguments in the case twice, the first time in January with now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the bench. During that session, O’Connor said she was concerned about the “sanctity of the home.”
Yea, they’ll be hollering about that.
Very last line: The case is Hudson v. Michigan, 04-1360.
June 16th, 2006 at 11:02 am
I’ve not read the case, so perhaps I shouldn’t be weighing in yet, but AFAIK that’s not really the issue. The exclusionary rule (of which I’ve admittedly never been a huge fan to begin with, even in my hard-core libertarian days) has long been tempered by an exception for evidence the cops would have found anyway.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Publius has an interesting, if unpopular, take on this. The comments are of particular interest.
My rule of thumb is, in any 5-4 decision, I’m probably not going to agree with the side Scalia has taken. In this case, at least, it looks like neither does SayUncle. 😉
June 16th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Your “conservative” Supreme Court justices in action.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:36 am
OK I admit to being lost here. Where in the constitution is the “knock and announce” rule?
June 17th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Billll Says: OK I admit to being lost here. Where in the constitution is the “knock and announce” rule?
No where does it say as much. I suppose it derives from “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…” and english common law.
I suppose just charging in is “unreasonable”.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
As much as I don’t like the ruling, from a strict constructionist / originalist perspective, it may be the technically correct one. The fourth amendment prohibits the search from being unreasonable, but given that a judge authorized a warrant, it was already ruled not to be. The police used excessive tactics in the entry, but no where in the text are they prohibited from doing so.
I guess the “knock & announce rule” is one of those constitutional clauses that those pinko commie lib’ruls like to make up out of whole cloth. I’m pretty sure the phrase “knock & announce” is right smack in between the phrase “separation of church and state” and the phrase “right to privacy” in the bill of rights.
June 17th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
TGirsch, me disagreeing with you is scarcely a first, but me disagreeing with you from the left might well be. Hold on to your seat:
Not so. The court issued an ordinary warrant, not no-knock warrant. To the extent the search violated the terms of the warrant, and did not fall under any of the established exceptions that excused the knock and announce rule (or, alternatively, the exceptions that would have allowed the cops to do the search with no warrant at all), the search was indeed unreasonable and, therefore, unconstitutional. In fact, the court in Hudson v. Michigan was unanimous on that point. Where they split 5-4 was over the question of whether this particular constitutional violation should trigger the exclusionary rule.